Elvis was Goofin' on Elvis

Elvis presely was pretending to be Elvis Presely.

Andy Kaufman, the late great 'song and dance man' or stand up comedian, was one of a vast number of people that impersonate Elvis, as remembered in the R.E.M song. There are lots of reasons why people impersonate Elvis, the most obvious being that he was a great singer, and being something of a first, also an "icon."

But that does not explain why, as quoted in the wikipedia article on Elvis impersonators, "There are now at least 85,000 Elvis’s around the world, compared to only 170 in 1977 when Elvis died. At this rate of growth, experts predict that by 2019 Elvis impersonators will make up a third of the world population." - The Naked Scientists 3rd December, 2000.

There is something about Elvis that makes him emminently impersonatable. I think that it is becuase Elvis was himself an Elvis impersonator. Elvis was, even more than most other rock stars of renoun, a perfect, hollow manifestation of machismo.
We are all impersonating ourselves. Especially men who must grow up and away from the people that raise them into 'a man.' Elvis was better than anyone else. But his bass, falseotto voice gives him away.